As Many Roads As Travellers
by LiquoriceLaw
Summary: Can strangers become family? Thirteen years ago the brothers went separate ways; when they meet again it may be only to find that the past can never be reclaimed. AU idea used with the kind permission of habu, aka tordles of tumblr. TMNT 2012
1. Chapter 1

**All credit for this premise belongs to habu and can be read in full on her tumblr.**

* * *

The rules of the game were simple.

Each turtle had tucked the end of his mask into the space between the apex of his shell and the back of his neck; the object was to grab your opponent's mask while keeping them from getting hold of your own.

Michelangelo had claimed his almost at once and danced taunting circles around his eldest brother until Leonardo secured his own trophy. Now the two of them were watching Raphael and Donatello trace wary circles around one another.

With warm, somnolent afternoon air lapping against the senses, the hum of ceaseless activity that characterised the city felt miles away. Leonardo had adopted his _sensei's_ meditational pose, kneeling with his hands resting above his knees. He practised breathing deeply and expanding the edges of his awareness as he had been taught, dividing his focus equally between his scuffling brothers, a butterfly at rest on a tall stalk of grass, the low roar of distant traffic, an ant scurrying across the dry earth, the breeze that played through the overhanging trees above the tunnel… He thought he could sense, without turning his head, his teacher sitting behind him in the shade of the young trees, whiskers twitching occasionally. Visits to the surface such as this were a rare occurrence and took a great deal of pleading on his and his brothers' part. This spot on an abandoned rail line had been carefully chosen and nearby the mouth of a tunnel offered refuge and concealment. Nevertheless he knew his teacher would not be at peace until they were back below ground.

Somewhere in the dusty heat a grasshopper chirped twice and fell silent; the heat had an almost palpable presence, undulating in heavy waves like a clement, sun-drenched ocean, and disturbing the stillness was too great an effort. Michelangelo's head had slumped onto his shoulder and his brother was blinking drowsily, the pause before he reopened his eyes growing progressively longer; in a few minutes he would be asleep. Leonardo let his gaze wander up to be lost in the vastness of the blue sky. He raised his face upwards and closed his eyes, allowing himself to bask in the rare sunlight, luxuriating in the blissful feeling of warmth spreading through his limbs.

And then something drew his attention back down to earth.

A prickling sensation crawled across his shoulders and crept around his neck. Shivering suddenly, he looked up and down the overgrown tracks. Raphael and Donatello had strayed a little away from the tunnel, absorbed in their contest; technically the use of weapons was illegal, but technically so was throwing punches and this hadn't stopped Raphael, who favoured the most direct solution to any given problem, and whose understanding of "direct" was as more or less synonymous with "violent". Accordingly Donatello had acquired a stick longer than himself and was using it to fend off his older brother. Michelangelo was breathing peacefully, swept under by oblivious sleep. Leonardo looked back, though not so quickly as to disturb his brother, and reassured himself that his _sensei_ was still sitting behind him, eyes closed and deep in meditation. He thought he saw a slight frown cross the rat's brow in the instant before the skin-crawling feeling of foreboding resumed and he turned back, now convinced.

He was being watched.

He looked past the open space where his brothers were sparring to the shadows beyond and, with a jolt of alarm, found the cause of his unrest.

Someone was standing just inside the chain-link fence.

Although the sacred, unbreakable rule - _we cannot be seen - _had been impressed on Leonardo until it was fixed indelibly in his mind, something more than the fear of discovery gripped him when his eyes fell on the shaded figure. He couldn't have said what it was about the stranger that chilled the very marrow in his bones – something in his silence, his terrible stillness. The man wore loose, wide garments belted at the waist. His face was veiled, obscured save for the eyes – eyes which, Leonardo realised, were fixed somewhere behind him and to the side. His gaze was not on him or his brothers, but reached beyond to where Splinter knelt.

Oroku Saki had found his old enemy.

Leonardo shook Michelangelo urgently awake. His brother grumbled and rubbed his eyes. Leonardo was already on his feet, pulling him back, and then without a sound Splinter was behind them, catching them both up and retreating into the shade of the sparse trees. Leonardo looked to where Donatello and Raphael were still dodging and feinting, exposed in the dappled sunlight of the tracks, hopelessly unaware.

"_kora! hashire!_" he called.

With a slight, silvery sound, blades extended over the stranger's hands. He stepped into the open, walking slowly and deliberately towards them. Catching sight of him at last, Donatello froze mid-parry, alerting Raphael, whose onslaught faltered and subsided; they both stood stock-still, watching as he advanced.

Leonardo could feel his teacher's heartbeat through his robe, pounding out the measure of his dread. Simultaneously Splinter set Michelangelo down, pushing him back into the tangled undergrowth, and reached into his robe. Leonardo looked back to his brothers, who had regained the power of movement but were seized by blind panic. Donatello had tripped. Raphael was pulling him to his feet. But neither of them was moving fast enough, and the man was getting closer.

Wordlessly, Leonardo slipped down from Splinter's shoulder.

For a moment Michelangelo was torn, clutching Splinter's sleeve tightly even as he reached after his brother, but in the second it took for him to decide and make as if to follow Leonardo, Splinter pulled him back.

The eldest turtle passed his brothers and ran straight for Oroku, who set his sights on the advancing target. He readied the knife in his hand as Leonardo drew closer, but when he was a few feet away the turtle veered to the side and made for the mouth of the tunnel. He turned back before he disappeared into the shadows, meeting Oroku's eye and ensuring he was following him.

"Leonardo!"

About to turn back to his old enemy, who stood indecisively between his sons, Oroku Saki heard the desperation in Splinter's voice and in an instant changed his plans.

This one.

He would kill the rest, but he would keep this one.

Taking Karai had been a bitter mixture of love and regret and jealousy and thwarted entitlement. When he discovered that Hamato had survived, his reunion with his daughter became a delicious prospect; a fully-trained kunoichi who would take down her own father without mercy in vengeance for the death of her mother. Their last confrontation had cost too much, and Hamato no longer deserved a quick death. He had decided to suspend his nemesis' demise, to let age and grief wear away at him like an ocean against a crumbling rock, and whennothing remained but a broken shell, when Karai was old enough, together they would strike the killing blow.

But Hamato knew none of this, and the patience required for such a distant torture did not sit easily with the virulence of Oroku's grudge. So when his spies brought him word of Hamato's freakish transformation and his abhorrent new family, he had resolved to hurt his rival once more, once more leave him with nothing. Hamato would lose this family as he had lost his first.

At first this had meant simply that they would all be killed, preferably before his eyes. And yet, as Oroku now realised, wondering why it hadn't occurred to him before, this was not the only way to lose a family, nor the most painful.

Karai had been an impulse and was a constant, bittersweet reminder. She had been for Tang Shen. This would be spite, pure and unadulterated.

This was for him.

With a last gloating look back at Hamato, he turned decisively and followed his quarry into the shadows.

Panic-stricken, Splinter looked back to his two middle sons, but they were nowhere to be seen. With unlikely stealth they had vanished into the long grass. Only two slender ribbons of fabric remained, one red, one purple, let fall and forgotten as the turtles fled. They were the sole reminder that until a few minutes ago the only discernible threat had been the prospect of more infighting on the way home, over who had cheated first and whether the apparent victory was valid. Standing in the empty sunlight with his youngest son clinging to him in terror, Splinter was left asking himself a question he had known once before, on a chill winter's night lit by sparks and tainted by the acrid scent of smoke.

How could everything go so wrong so fast?

"Boys, wait here!" he commanded, hoping against hope that they were still within earshot, though he knew his own lessons had taught them the very opposite.

_Watch for your opportunity, and when it comes, make your escape. _

_Go silently. Go swiftly. _

_Go far. _

He wavered one more second, and then gave chase into the darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: I have no idea why there is so much Japanese in this. The fact that I don't speak Japanese will be painfully obvious to anyone who does. It seems most natural to me that it would really be the family's first language, but I think I got a little carried away, so my apologies for that. Anything important is given in English.**

* * *

"Leonardo!" Splinter's voice was growing hoarse from calling, but only echoes answered him. He had run into the gloom, ears straining for the slightest sound, the small knife gripped uselessly in his hand, and felt a clawing dread when he saw the light at the end of the tunnel. On the other side he had searched the tracks beyond, the green saplings, the rusted fence, calling and calling.

Nothing.

Doubling back into the waning sunlight, Splinter combed the thicketed tracks with mounting terror, calling for Raphael and Donatello, no longer caring how much noise he made if only he could hear an answering voice. There was nothing.

"masaka…"

With trembling claws Splinter retrieved his sons' masks from the ground. In spite of the late rays soaking into his fur, he felt cold. Once more he spent a desperate instant paralysed at the tunnel mouth, _willing_ his sons to show themselves, to creep back into sight. Any second now they would come running to him, laughing gleefully the way they always did on the rare occasions they managed to escape his eye, jostling at his knees and demanding praise for their stealth in clamouring voices.

And still there was nothing.

Crumpling the strips of fabric in his fist, he turned back into the tunnel and let the darkness swallow him again.

* * *

He searched for hours, scouring every recess of the abandoned tunnel, the tracks, even venturing into the surrounding streets in silent bounds from shadow to shadow. Night had fallen when at last, in the rundown parking lot of a building that backed onto the disused tracks, he came upon the small blue piece of fabric. Time slowed down as he drew closer, not wanting to see, but there could be no mistake. The mask was Leonardo's. It had been precisely severed on one side, between the eye-holes and the knot.

His last frail hope and his strength gave out at the same moment. Splinter fell to his knees.

Michelangelo detached himself from his arms and stepped down. He picked up Leonardo's mask, holding it tightly and looking around, before turning enquiringly back to his sensei.

"watashi no ani wa doko ni aru, otou san?"

Splinter placed a paw on his youngest son's shoulder and bowed his head. Even if he could have spoken past the lump in his throat, there was nothing to say. The turtle tugged at the collar of his robe and held the mask out to him with imploring eyes, grappling with a plea that surpassed his capacity for language.

Eventually he gave up on Splinter and decided to take charge of the situation himself. Tottering forwards, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted at the top of his lungs.

"Leo! nii-chan!"

"Michelangelo." Splinter's voice came out thick with sorrow. He had spent the last hours frantic and single-minded in his search for his sons, but now other concerns were filtering back into his mind and he was able to grasp, dimly, that all but one of his sons were gone, and, more clearly, that he would have to act decisively to preserve that one, precious exception. As his youngest son continued to call for his brother, his thin voice growing higher and more distressed as his calls went unanswered, Splinter rose. Slowly he approached his son, burdened by an overwhelming weight. It felt as though a lifetime's worth of age had descended on him over the course of mere hours. He stood behind Michelangelo and put out a paw to still his pacing, opening his mouth with no idea of what to say.

"My son …" At once Splinter stiffened, hearing a noise from farther down the lot.

"Who's there?" The challenge came from some way off but the speaker, emerging from a brightly lit doorway set into the back of the building, was making searching sweeps with a flashlight.

Splinter snatched Michelangelo up, stifling his latest cry, and edged away down the side of the building with his back pressed against the rough brickwork. Meeting with a corner he broke into a run down a narrow passage. Behind him he heard a shout followed by the sound of someone giving chase.

Splinter emerged from the backstreet and took a sharp left, evading the eyes of his pursuer for another few seconds. He looked to the middle of the road and his eyes fell on a manhole cover. Giving silent thanks he sped towards it, ignoring Michelangelo's shrill protests that they needed to go back because they hadn't found Leo yet.

He lifted the cover, leapt down and pulled it back behind him, wincing at the harsh sound of metal scraping over concrete. He waited, clinging to the ladder with one hand and holding his youngest son to his chest with the other. Then, faintly, he heard footsteps on the road above his head. Michelangelo looked up at him with enormous eyes and Splinter returned his gaze, imploring him silently; _please, please be quiet, or I will have nothing left._ The smallest turtle seemed to understand and at the sound of feet treading on the manhole cover he only buried his face in Splinter's robe. The next few seconds made up their own unbearable lifetime as Splinter crouched in the blind darkness, sure the hammering of his heart would give them away.

In fact the night watchman only gave the empty road another sweeping scan with his flashlight and turned back, puzzled, to resume his station.

Below him, Splinter stepped from the bottom of the ladder and began the winding journey home.

Later, once Michelangelo was home, he would search for Raphael and Donatello. Although he didn't entertain much hope that he would find them, for the time being he had pushed this despair with the rest of his grief behind a screen in his mind. He was aware of it looming there, casting unbearable shadows, like the patterns on an _andon _lamp. But he would not allow himself to be overcome. One of his four sons remained to him, and he needed him.

His youngest child slid a little way down his shoulder and Splinter lifted him higher, unable to keep himself from holding him closer than was necessary. Michelangelo had long since fallen asleep, Leo's mask still in his hand. Mindlessly, in the dazed and automatic state that had engulfed him as soon as the adrenaline wore off to cushion him from the shock, Splinter began to sing in a low voice.

"_nenneko shasshari mase, neta ko no kawaisa, okite naku ko no, nenkororo, tsura nikusa, n__enkororon, nenkororon…"_

The swaying, haunting sound of the lullaby soothed Splinter more than it did his son, who plucked restlessly at his gown and sighed in his sleep. He kept singing as he made his way through the tunnels, twisting and turning into the heart of the labyrinth, and stopped only when he came to the last few words, about taking the baby to the shrine to pray.

"_What will you pray for? His whole life, may he be, hushabye, healthy…__"_

His voice failed and as the last echoes died in the dark grottos of the sewer, a deep silence fell. Splinter stroked the whorls and ridges of Michelangelo's shell and became aware, slowly, of a decision he had made the moment he saw that sad strip of blue discarded on the ground. The decision that would keep his last son - his only son - safe, no matter what, and forever more.

Michelangelo could never leave the sewers again.

* * *

Nearly seven thousand miles away, Oroku Saki returned home.

Dismissing the attendants who stepped forward to wait on him, he made his way through the house till he reached a screen painted with orange lilies and dragonflies.

He slid the panel open and Karai stirred, ink-black hair tousled but already alert. Though young, his adoptive daughter was proving to be an apt student.

"Karai."

"Father?" She sat up. "You're back."

"Yes, Karai. You remember I promised to bring you a gift?"

She gave him her slanting smile, eyes eager. "What did you get me?"

He stepped fully into the room and knelt down, setting his burden down on her sleeping mat. Karai leant forward expectantly but looked bemused when she saw Leonardo. Sometime during the flight back to Tokyo the turtle had accepted his defeat and stopped fighting to get free. Now he lay curled on the blanket, convulsing in exhausted but troubled sleep.

Oroku had been impressed in spite of himself not only by the mettle, but by the undeniable skill of the odd-looking creature. It had moved with a speed and subtlety that no infant should be capable of; inevitably he had cornered and subdued it, but by the time he returned to that overgrown section of railway, Hamato and the rest of his menagerie were nowhere to be found.

Nevertheless, on balance he was pleased by the day's events. This prodigy could work to his advantage, and it was Oroku's firm intention that it would.

Karai, still looking mystified, tapped the edge of its shell. "What is it?"

Oroku rose and stepped over to the door, various possible replies running through his mind. A trophy? A hostage? A serf?

A pet?

He turned his head as he left the room and paused in the doorway. Revenge meant leaving nothing. So he would take everything, body _and_ soul. Allegiance, loyalty…

Even love.

"A brother," he answered, and slid the screen closed behind him.

Brow furrowed, Karai studied the sleeping… whatever-it-was and heaved a sigh. The last present she had received after one of her father's trips had been her beautiful, cherished knife; by comparison this was a profound disappointment. She pushed it to the end of her bed. It didn't wake, but murmured something unintelligible and began to shiver. Karai watched it in disgust before fetching another blanket to throw over its huddled form; presumably her father wanted her to keep it alive, for whatever reason.

She settled back down with her hands behind her head and listened while the creature's soft noises subsided, its breathing growing easier as it fell into a deeper sleep. She resolved that, while she would make the best of this latest gift, the next time her father went away she would tell him what she wanted in advance.


	3. Chapter 3

Jill straightened the papers on her desk, rearranged her pens again, and wondered if four minutes was too brief an interval to make it worthwhile checking her email again. At four forty-eight on a Friday afternoon it was clear that no one in the office was doing anything more productive than watching the time, but the heavy shackles of propriety kept them inside their neat cubicles like big cats pacing their enclosures in a poorly-funded zoo.

It had been one of those weeks, the kind that start with a Monday morning and only get worse from there. But the days, for all their interminable slowness, had crawled past, and at last it was Friday, and then the afternoon, and finally the hated twelve minutes evaporated, the end of the day came and Jill thankfully joined the throng of people fleeing the building, escaping into the weekend.

Now there was only the journey home between her and her cosy apartment, but even that seemed to have undertaken to be as unpleasant as possible. With the onset of darkness the sultry heat of the afternoon had swelled and burst into cascading torrents of rain, spilling a grey deluge over the city. Two heavy shopping bags, an overdue restocking of such essentials as apple juice and spaghetti hoops, bumped against her legs with every step, the wet plastic steadily soaking her thin summer tights. She contemplated hailing a taxi but then remembered that she had to pay the babysitter when she got back; money certainly had a way of spending itself as fast as you could earn it. The babysitting was a short term solution and from next week onwards she had rearranged her hours so that she could be home in time to collect Timothy from day-care herself, but it would mean a lot of working from home in the evenings to make up the difference in income, and Timothy got so bored when left to himself… she paused at the street corner to reposition her bags where the handles were cutting into her fingers. Balancing work with motherhood wasn't easy at the best of times but things had certainly got more difficult since Scott had made the abrupt decision to move out in order to concentrate on his long-running pet project, a garden landscaping company which apparently had greater need of him than his three-year-old son.

Still hesitating at the junction between two streets, she decided to splurge on a bus ride the rest of the way home, reasoning that it would save her legs for less than the price of a cab and cut down on the babysitting fee by virtue of time saved. She could get a stop along either street from here, so having chosen to turn left where the sidewalk was a little less crowded she set off, a litany of minor worries still tumbling across her mind's eye.

Jill only wanted a quiet life. She couldn't possibly know that, having made that chance turning onto a nondescript street on a waterlogged evening, a quiet life was exactly what she wasn't going to get.

Partway down the street the pedestrians veered in close to the shop fronts to avoid a substantial puddle rapidly encroaching upon the sidewalk. A storm drain had been sectioned off with traffic cones and yellow barricades for public works which looked, in the grand tradition of public works, as though they had had very little by way of actual work done within recent memory.

Jill was navigating around the edge of the lagoon when a moving figure inside the enclosure caught her eye. Looking more closely she saw that it was not kneeling as she had initially assumed; it was merely very small, not more than a few feet high. Struck by sudden panic at the thought of a stray child being lost to the nightmare netherworld of the sewers, she hurried towards the barriers, looking up and down the street for another frantic parent. Pedestrians on the sidewalk were walking briskly past sporting hoods or umbrellas, heads down, hurrying to get out of the driving rain. No one had noticed the child, nor did they pay her any attention as she squeezed between the barricades to reach it.

Up close she was able to discern three alarming things about the small figure. First, it was entirely naked. Second, it was green. These two details acted in concert to make readily apparent the third fact, which was that it was decidedly non-human.

It was attempting to use a length of scrap metal to prise off the manhole cover, an enterprise which, she would later reflect, showed a remarkably advanced grasp of the concept of leverage. For the moment all she could do was stand and gawp.

The creature looked startled by her sudden intrusion and froze, wide-eyed, mid-lever. It glanced from her to the grate and back. Then it straightened up and said something, politely, in an incomprehensible language, pointing to the wet bars of the grate.

Jill sensed that she was being asked something, but that was about all she took away from the discourse. "Um…"

Perceiving her bewilderment, the creature changed tack.

"Can you open this, please?"

For some reason, hearing it speak in clear, well-modulated English was what pushed her over the edge. She lost her tenuous grip on the shopping and heard a tin of soup splosh sadly into the gutter.

"I… I don't think so," she said shakily. "Isn't it bolted down?"

The creature didn't seem to know the phrase "bolted down", but it could recognise that her answer was in the negative and its composure evaporated. It let the length of pipe fall to the ground with a clang and sat down on the curb, head in hands, the very picture of dejection.

"Why do you want it open?" Jill hadn't quite recovered from the initial shock of finding the creature, but it didn't seem inclined to attack her.

"I want to go home." It looked up at her with doleful brown eyes and, to her horror, began to sob.

"Oh, don't – don't upset yourself, now -" said Jill, appalled. For some reason it seemed the only thing worse than stumbling across an unidentifiable green monster was stumbling across an unidentifiable green monster in the midst of an emotional crisis. She could feel the essential decency of her character, curse it, _curse it,_ buckling under the pressure, and any moment now she would be offering to take it in and feed it and care for it and Timothy would get attached and then no doubt it would grow into a towering behemoth with a gentle heart but the army would shoot it anyway in some climactic battle causing widespread devastation across the city and teaching us, once again, that mankind are the real monsters… her rambling, B-movie-that's-always-playing-when-you-wake-up-at- three-am -after-falling-asleep-in-front-of-the-TV-inspired train of thought braked to a screeching halt as she watched it drag the back of its hand across its face, leaving a grimy trail, and made a decision.

It was a child. A child of indeterminate species, but a child nonetheless. She would get it out of the rain, give it something to eat, and then – she added the final stage of her plan firmly, as though imposing a mental condition for her kindness – drop it off with someone marginally more qualified to deal with… well, with whatever kind of situation this was.

With a mixture of nervousness and resignation, Jill held out a hand.

"Come on. You can't stay here," she said, as kindly as she could manage.

Sniffing, it looked up into her face. It looked just as troubled as Jill felt, and that brought home to her the ridiculousness of the situation._ It really _is_ more afraid of you than you are of it. _

"Come on, pumpkin." There was genuine warmth in her voice this time, because really, what could a two-foot tall creature possible do that would make her feel worse than leaving it lost and alone on the sidewalk?

The creature shrank into itself, recoiling from her expectant gaze. Tactfully, she dropped her eyes and busied herself with an unnecessary adjustment of her collar; a moment later she felt a small, scaly hand shyly slip into hers. She helped it to its feet, where it waited patiently as she gathered up her shopping, and they walked side by side wordlessly through the rain to the bus stop. Before they reached it Jill draped a cardigan over the creature's head and shoulders in a largely ineffective attempt to disguise its non-human nature, but the bus driver was near the end of his shift and waved them aboard with barely a glance in their direction. Once seated, Jill's companion became utterly engrossed by her watch, studying its moving hands with a rather worrying attentiveness so that she unbuckled it from her wrist and delivered it into its possession, the better to turn her own attentive gaze on it. As the bus made its lurching way forwards Jill She hazarded a few questions.

"What's your name, sweetheart?"

"Donnie."

"How old are you, Donnie?"

He - he had a name now, a disconcertingly normal one in fact, and she couldn't very well go on thinking of it as "it" - answered without looking up from his toy. "Two-and-a-half."

"What_ are you, Donnie?"_ was the next question that came to her, but it seemed a tad impolite and she wasn't sure she was emotionally equipped to deal with the answer. There were plenty of other things she could ask, such as why he imagined dismantling a drainage system would help him get home, or where home was, or whether there were more of ... whatever-he-was…

She decided to keep things simple.

"Are you hungry?"

That got him to look up. "Yes."

"What do you like to eat?"

He looked thoughtfully into the distance. "I like food that doesn't move."

Jill laughed, spontaneously, only to find him looking surprised by her reaction. "So do I. That's my son's favourite kind too. We have lots at home." She looked out of the window, aware of a certain lapse of decorum and feeling oddly chastened. "Probably mostly that."

Donnie raised his eyebrows at her as if to ask if she was done with her babbling. When she kept looking out of the window he returned to his watch-watching, by now having worked out the relationship between the rapidly altering seconds and the minute hand and smiling delightedly each time the latter ticked forwards another tiny notch, exactly when he had predicted it would.

When she arrived on the appropriate floor of her building and trudged soggily through her door, Julia was already waiting in the kitchen, bag packed, evidently in a hurry to be somewhere. The babysitter accepted her wages with her usual half-embarrassed gratitude – the daughter of a neighbour of a friend, she was due to begin college in the fall and using her remaining time to scrape together some book-money – before looking suspiciously at the shrouded figure beside Jill. Jill tried to surreptitiously hide it with her coat, in the process learning that hiding someone with your coat is a difficult thing to do surreptitiously.

"Who's this?"

"Oh, it's -" Jill wished she'd had the presence of mind to think of an excuse before opening the door. "he's, ah, the son of a colleague of mine – she asked me to take care of him for her, had to work late tonight -"

"I see." Julia's gaze slid past her as she lost interest and she looked out of the window into the rain. "Charming weather."

"Do you have a ride?"

"Oh yeah, a friend's picking me up. Desperate for me to go to some bar." Julia herself sounded less than keen. "I know you change your hours next week but let me know if you need me again before September, OK? Tim is actually one of the most bearable children I've looked after."

"Will do, Julia. Thanks again for all your help."

Shrugging on her coat, the teen poked her head into the next room where the TV could be heard mumbling to itself. "I'm going now, Tim! Are you coming to say hi to your mom?"

"Hi Mom! Bye Jullah!" Timothy followed her as far as the door, waving vigorously. It was only after Jill shut it, relaxing slightly with one more human interaction successfully navigated, that he took notice of her little green shadow.

"What's _that?_" he breathed.

The foundling was hiding behind Jill, one nervous eye peeping out from behind her skirt. She tried to think of a satisfactory response and failed.

"It's - it - I don't know, sweetheart. He says his name's Donnie."

"Is he nanimal?" asked Timothy, trying to get his hands on the creature, which stayed resolutely on the other side of Jill.

"I don't know, Tim. I _think_ he's a person." _Even though he looks like a giant turtle,_ she added mentally. _How does that square with the fact that he can talk better than my infant?_ _Also,_ - she could feel the beginnings of a headache as another silent voice chimed in -_ there's no such thing as a giant turtle. And yet – _

And yet, here we are.

"Either way, he needs a bath," she said, looking at the dirty rainwater running in rivulets down his legs onto the carpet and shooing out the contending voices in her head. "So do you, mister!"

Timothy let out the usual wail of protest and made several desperate bids for freedom as she struggled to get them both upstairs, but once he saw the enthusiasm with which her small green foundling took to the warm water he changed his tune considerably. Soon the two of them were happily splashing away and Jill was left with a rare moment to soak her own feet. She looked on with a bewilderment quickly eclipsed by fondness as a yellow duck and a goggle-eyed squid swept swooshing trails of bubbles through the soapy water in the firm grip of one pudgy pink hand and one three-fingered green one. Timothy was a gregarious, outgoing child, who already, during this famous period of tantrums and boundary-testing, possessed an almost unlimited supply of sunny exuberance, but nonetheless – Jill couldn't deny to herself that his father's departure had affected him. He had been confused and lonely, keenly aware of a bereavement but unable to understand its cause. Just the other day he had been asking her why his friend from day-care had a brother and whether he could have one too and her heart had broken just a little because she thought that the odds of that were suddenly looking low. Now, as he regaled his companion with a lengthy and involved biography of the yellow duck by means of an animated if largely incomprehensible stream of toddler-ese, he looked as happy as a clam at high tide.

_Or a child in a bath with a talking turtle. _

Jill began towelling off her feet. She'd never had a head for similes.

Later, over fish fingers and peas, she watched the newcomer eat in precise one-pea-per-fork-prong mouthfuls and wondered what she was going to do next. She could think of a number of places to take him – the police station, the community centre… the zoo… but, as she slowly came to realise, the unease churning inside her was not because she couldn't decide which one would be most appropriate, but because she knew, with sinking certainty, that she wouldn't be taking him anywhere.

The moment he had looked up at her from the rain-soaked sidewalk and she had reached out to him with a helpless hand, he had become her responsibility. She doubted a trained professional would take the time - or even, as in her case, be stunned and confused long enough - to notice the gentleness in his eyes, or the heart-breaking spindliness of his limbs, or the way the tip of his tongue crept into view when he concentrated. He wouldn't be safe in the custody of anyone less concerned by these things than by discerning what _exactly_ he was, if necessary by means of a good autopsy.

But all these clamouring fears, dimly populated by shady government departments, men in white coats and disquieting instruments – inspired largely by late-night, low budget flicks which Jill had never thought would so inform a decision of such gravity – were secondary to a calmer, more lucid voice, reminding Jill that not three months ago her own son had lost his father. The child in front of her had lost everything, and Jill would not - _could_ not - leave him out in the cold.

She would take care of him herself, at least until she could find out where he came from and return him there. As for how she would go about doing it… that would just have to wait until tomorrow.

Donnie looked up at her suddenly from the geometric arrangement of his supper and when she was treated to another brief, shy smile of unalloyed sweetness it dawned on her, with that slight sting of resentment that so often characterises familial love, that she'd never really had a choice.

And yet in an odd way, it felt right. It seemed natural to once again set three places for pudding, and afterwards to _fill_ the sofa rather than share it with that awful, aching empty space. Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say, and perhaps that was all it was, the universe filling a hole that was never supposed to be there. If so, she couldn't help but question the universe's logic, but felt, on the whole, as a child drifted peacefully off to sleep on either side of her, that the effort was appreciated. The house no longer felt empty. Tim had looked happier tonight than she'd seen him for weeks. So she wondered, as she too began the gentle descent into sleep, if she was setting her standards too high. Perhaps a quiet life was too much to ask for. Perhaps the best you could hope for was the odd moment of peace, on a battered old sofa, after a comforting meal, to get your breath back before things got too exciting again.

Nevertheless, when the TV tried to play _It Came from Death Mountain_ her hand moved with impressive speed to secure the remote and hit the kill switch.

She felt she'd had enough science fiction for one day.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: Hello people, sorry about the long wait for this one, haven't had much time/inspiration for writing lately. If it's any consolation, this is the longest chapter yet, if not by a huge amount. I hope it's worth the wait, or at least the time it takes to read it.**

* * *

"… and then the crocodile was sad because all the animals said its teeth was too big."

"_Were_ too big."

"Were too big."

"I see." Kirby navigated April around a sandwich board advertising a new pizza topping and tried to make sense of the story so far. He was giving it his all but having a hard time keeping up with the saga of a group of what were, in his view, unrealistically judgemental jungle animals. He had noticed that in spite of the best intentions things tended to get rather drastically restructured when being narrated by a three year old. The changes were unexpected and often interesting but did not make any great concessions to listener comprehension.

"Daddy!" April had stopped short, gripping his hand tightly and pointing down a side alley.

"What is it?"

"There's someone there."

Kirby glanced along the alley. It was the usual grotty affair, festooned with trash and graffiti tags, the former none too fragrant after last night's downpour; now he was paying attention, he too could hear a busy rustling from behind a dumpster. Rats, probably, or perhaps a raccoon – at any rate, something unsavoury which could deliver a nasty bite. He made to move off and continue their journey home, pulling gently at April's hand, but it slipped from between his fingers and she tottered down the alleyway.

"April!" Faintly alarmed, Kirby gave chase and followed her to the source of the sound. As he scooped her up, turning to shield her from the plague-ridden contents of New York's elegant waste disposal system, he thought he heard from the far side of the dumpster a tiny intake of breath.

Turning his head slowly, he surveyed the corner of the dumpster. A few seconds passed in silence. Frowning, he took a step back, and then another, and half turned away again, because whoever was lurking behind that rusted red box was no doubt best avoided, especially by a man with a young daughter to take care of. Then he set April down and walked back, because no one could call themselves a scientist who heard mysterious noises from behind dumpsters in sketchy alleys and _didn't_ need to find out what made them.

And really, who ever heard of a rat that could gasp?

Placing a hand on the corner of the dumpster, he stepped forwards and looked down into a pair of huge, unnatural green eyes.

His first thought was of aliens. Little green men, that was the classic description; few digits, big head, slender limbs, not much by way of a nose. It more or less fit the creature in front of him, except for the fact that this one had a distinctly stocky build – no bigger than April, but rather wider - , but then, he reasoned, even assuming the classical "little green men" description was accurate, a stretch given the typical sources, anatomical variation was ubiquitous among humans, and there was no reason the same shouldn't be true for life originating on other planets… He looked at the crouching creature in consternation, a multitude of thoughts vying for supremacy in his mind. He would be the first to admit that the observation that won out scored few points for practicality.

_I always thought alien invaders would be _taller.

The creature was green, roughly humanoid in shape, and looking distinctly the worse for wear. Its face was filthy, masked with grime around the wide eyes; it was breathing rapidly through clenched teeth and in one hand it gripped a rusted fork, evidently salvaged from the garbage. He could just make out that beneath the dirt its skin was composed of tiny, tessellating shapes, which looked - if he squinted - almost like scales. He wondered what substance made up the armour plating that covered its chest and the shield that projected from its back; he felt an absent desire to touch it, to run his hands over the alien material, which looked hard, smooth, and yet somehow organic – somehow familiar. Apparently aboard the same train of thought, April detached herself from his knee and trundled forwards, hands outstretched in that gesture of welling juvenile adoration which sends even the most dignified of cats bolting for safety.

But this creature didn't run. Instead it gathered itself for a leap, launched itself off the ground and sank its teeth into her hand, at the same time stabbing the fork into her shoulder. Kirby yelled and flung out a fist to knock it back, sending it flying. It bounced off a trash can with a hollow clatter, rolled and sprang back onto its feet, its eyes two furious lime-green slits. Heart pounding, Kirby looked at April's hand – the skin wasn't broken, much to his relief, but the side of her palm bore a pronounced bite mark.

April, still staring at her hand, took a moment to register her injury. She exchanged a saucer-eyed stare with Kirby before rounding on the creature.

"… you bite me?" she demanded, and Kirby heard her voice shift from incredulity to indignation. "You _bited_ me!"

Kirby looked at her attacker. It was crouched low to the ground, fists clenched, breathing hard; its eyes were restless, darting from him to April to the fork which had fallen to the ground, thwarted by the strap of her dungarees, as though it was calculating how to get it back. As the fear that had seized him when it leapt at April subsided, Kirby looked more calmly at the tension etched in its shoulders and its dilated pupils. He felt he was entitled to lay claim to some experience in this field; only a fool could incur as many rat bites as he had in his time as an experimental psychologist without having learnt the difference between aggression and simple terror.

Slowly lowering himself to a crouch, he smiled gently and held out a hand to the creature.

It eyed his hand suspiciously but as he waited he saw its breathing begin to steady. He leant a little closer and at once it tensed up, tiny fists flying forwards like miniature green boxing gloves.

"hottoite kure yo!" Its voice was high and shrill and communicated far more effectively by its pitch than by the staccato torrent of syllables.

"It's all right. I'm not going to hurt you." Kirby said gently and, much more slowly this time, reached forward. The creature swiped frantically at the air in front of it.

"No! Go away!"

April's jaw fell open, neatly reflecting Kirby's own mental reaction. She tugged at his shoulder. "It can talk!"

Having established that it could in fact talk, rather than merely make angry-sounding noises, he tried to engage it in dialogue.

"Are you lost?"

There was no response, only more suspicious glaring. Kirby tried again.

"Where's your mother? Your father?"

"Your mom and dad," April translated helpfully.

This seemed to prompt a spark of recognition. "chichi -" it said, looking round uncertainly.

This meant nothing to Kirby, but he tried to tease out the story. "Where is your… chichi?"

"I don know." The panic in its voice was palpable now. It clenched and unclenched its fists. "My brothers gone."

Brothers…?

Kirby leant back on his heels. April was looking up at him with big, trusting eyes, perfectly confident that he would know what to do. And the worst part was he _did_. If one thing was clear, it was that he couldn't leave it here. It was small and alone and very frightened and as if that didn't provide obligation enough, it bit. He couldn't leave it here for the next unsuspecting graffiti artist or wandering drunk. Kirby sighed. Being responsible could really, to use the vernacular, suck.

How was he going to get a small green whatever-it-was to the car without sacrificing any fingers? Clearly its coping strategy for vulnerability was violence. It had a precocious grasp on the practicality of armed combat and a frightening willingness to improvise when it came to weaponry. In short, it was small but vicious, and he wasn't about to risk April's safety.

Besides, surely even in New York there was a limit to what you could carry down the street without attracting someone's attention.

Kirby turned to his daughter and gestured to the end of the alley.

"April, honey, go and wait for me up there."

She squeezed his hand and gave him a supportive pat on the shoulder. "OK."

Carefully avoiding any sudden movements he turned back to the creature, easing off his jacket.

"Now, why don't you let me help you. We'll find your brothers, and "chichi", and take you home. I'm sure they'll all be pleased to see you. " He kept his voice soft, aware he was rambling slightly but trying to offer reassurance through his tone as much as his words. As he gathered his jacket in his right hand his eyes fell on the fork that had recently been wielded against April. He picked it up, causing the creature to stiffen, and held it out in offering, handle first, keeping up his stream of comforting nonsense. "Oh look, it's your fork. What a nice one, where did you find this? It's got almost all of its prongs as well. Always useful to have a -"

The creature, which had been edging forwards, eyes locked on him, made a sudden grab for the fork, snatching it and darting back again. But before it could escape, Kirby made his move. He bundled it into his jacket and knotted the arms while it was still flailing around in fury at his betrayal, then got to his feet and strode to the end of the alley, clamping the struggling mass of coat and green limbs and outrage under his arm.

It was fortunate Kirby O'Neil didn't speak Japanese, because at this moment he was being treated to the worst insults a two-and-a-half-year-old vocabulary has to offer.

April gave him a concerned look as he caught up with her. He reached out to take her hand and spoke loudly to drown out the rising torrent of invective issuing from under his right arm.

"So what happened to the crocodile in the end?"

* * *

He insisted that April sit in the front on the way home, but she twisted around to converse with the angry coat prisoner, which seemed by this time to have worn itself out.

"I'm April. I'm three." She held up the corresponding number of fingers, to within a tolerance of one. "What's your name?"

The response was muffled by Kirby's jacket, although not enough to conceal its surliness. "Rurfurel."

Kirby glanced at his mirror. "Russell?"

"Nmm! Rufur_url_!"

"Raphael? Like the painter?" _That's an odd name for a small green monster, _thought Kirby, only to wonder a second later why Russell would be any less odd.

"Raphael's a nice name," said April generously. "When we get home we're going to watch Ses - Sesame Street, and we can play with my hula hoop. I can do six hula hoops without dropping it!" she said proudly. "And we're having pizza for dinner, and maybe - maybe ice cream if we're good, and we can have a sleepover tonight, you can sleep on the beanbag. And…"

As she continued to outline the delights of what was apparently going to be their bright new future as a family - apparently all was forgiven as far as the biting incident went - Kirby heard a smothered groan from the backseat and saw Raphael's head slump forwards in an oddly precocious display of exasperation. Somewhere towards the end of April's inventory of her toys he realised Raphael had fallen asleep. He caught her eye and she gave him a tolerant smile. "He's sleepy."

"Hm." Kirby slowed to let a car turn onto the road ahead of him. …"April. When we were walking past that alley, how did you know he was there? And that he wasn't just a rat in the trash cans?"

April frowned in puzzlement. "I knew the same way like you, Dad."

"No, sweetie, I couldn't tell. How did you know?"

His daughter screwed her face up some more and then let it go blank, shrugging her shoulders. "I just did."

"Hm."

Kirby pondered this as they turned onto a larger street, joining a scudding, metallic flood of cars surging through the city like the sucking tide over rock pools. April turned to look out of the window, watching the figures thronging the sidewalk and the neon lights beginning to emerge as the sky turned dark. The rest of the journey home passed in thoughtful silence.

* * *

Unbelievably, Kirby got through Sesame Street (Raphael was not a fan), pizza (this he liked, once he had made it clear he would not put it past Kirby to poison him and stopped sulking long enough to try it), ice cream (strawberry was acceptable, chocolate was not), hula hooping (April was tired and only managed 4 revolutions; Raphael refused to participate) hide-and-seek (Raphael was very good at this, and for a worrying ten minutes Kirby thought he had escaped into the city in spite of the fact that he had closed every window in the house) and a turn with April's coloured puzzle blocks (these had completely failed to catch his interest, leaving him asleep where he had dropped on the kitchen floor, surrounded by painted pieces of wood) before having the epiphany which explained the last few hours of nagging familiarity and made him clap a hand to his forehead in exasperation.

"He's a _turtle!_"

April, still playing contentedly with her puzzle, looked from their sleeping guest to her father - not unkindly, but in a way that suggested she was questioning his sanity.

"Turtles can't talk. And he's too big."

"Sweetheart, until this afternoon I didn't think anything apart from people could talk. But look at him."

He beckoned her over, guiding her small hand onto the hard surface of Raphael's carapace. He kept his other hand on the arch over the turtle's neck, ready to restrain it if it decided to defend itself again, but it was fast asleep and made no resistance to April's investigation. She traced a finger along the groove between two scutes and in spite of everything else, Kirby was transported by the sheer unadulterated love he always felt when he saw that look in her eyes – the moment when she found a piece of the world that didn't quite fit and had to adjust her worldview until it did. Every time it happened, he knew, that perspective grew a little bigger, and the care with which she found a place for the new knowledge told him there was a sharp intelligence burgeoning behind those innocent blue eyes. She looked back up at him, intrigued.

"How did he learn to talk? You said real animals don't talk."

"It looks like I was wrong." Kirby ran a hand through his thinning hair and looked down at his latest project. He knew there was a lot he was deliberately pushing to the back of his mind that would have to be dealt with sooner or later, such as where it came from, how he could return it to its kin, or… or whether there was some higher authority who should handle this. But for the moment he was held fast by simple curiosity. He might have taken it off the street out of a sense of responsibility, but he knew the real reason he had brought it home was that it would drive him crazy not to at least try to figure out what its story was. Exactly how he was going to accomplish that was another matter.

He clapped a hand on his knee and got to his feet. "Bedtime, April."

Immediately she twisted her head to look sharply at him. "What about Raphael?"

Kirby groaned inwardly. Another way his curiosity was going to come back to haunt him… to April this wasn't a stray they were offering a temporary resting place until it could be returned home, or a science project they had taken on in the noble pursuit of discovery; in April's eyes, Raphael was now a fixture. He had been well and truly adopted.

"He'll be fine, April. Look, he's fast asleep," said Kirby, trying to hint that this was a state of being to be emulated.

"I said he can sleep on my beanbag."

"No. April." _No_ way, he added mentally. Bringing it home was one thing; leaving it in the same room as his infant daughter overnight was another. Had she forgotten that its first action on being discovered had been to bite her?

"I _said_."

He looked down at her lowered eyebrows, noted the stubbornness emanating from every freckle. Kirby recognised the tone of her voice as the same one she would use to remind him of his own promises and sighed the sigh of a parent who has lost the moral ground. He couldn't very well fault her for keeping her word.

"Fine, he can sleep on your beanbag, but he stays in the kitchen."

The wail of protest went up immediately. "But, Dad –"

"No, April. He's staying in here until we know he's safe."

"Safe?" April looked around the kitchen in bewilderment, but found no signs of imminent danger.

"I meant…" Kirby sighed again. "Of course he's safe. But he's sleeping in the kitchen. Go and get your beanbag."

She scrambled up the stars to fetch it and came back barely visible behind the mass of whispering Styrofoam beads. It was a rose pink affair, adorned with silver stars, and if Kirby had to guess he wouldn't have said Raphael would approve of the colour scheme. But the turtle accepted it happily enough in his sleep, burrowing his face into it without waking when Kirby carefully picked him up and moved it under him.

April noted this with delight. "He likes it!" she said, giving Kirby a smile which made him feel sadder than any number of tears.

As he followed her into the bathroom and handed her down her toothbrush he tried to find a way to explain the temporary status of their adoptee. In her bedroom, helping her look for her preferred pair of pyjamas, he began, haltingly.

"April… you know Raphael won't be here forever."

She paused, resting her hands on the edge of the open drawer. "No. I know."

This was surprising; he had expected more resistance to the idea.

"How did you know?" he asked cautiously.

"Mom went away too."

His throat constricted at the almost matter-of-fact tone of her voice, which couldn't quite conceal a note of wistfulness. For a moment he couldn't speak. He wasn't sure how much April understood about what had happened with her mother, but for a moment he cursed himself for ever bringing Raphael home, if it meant she was only going to have to live through his loss. She couldn't learn that this was how it worked – that people came and left, that grief was the inevitable conclusion to love… or perhaps that was exactly what she would have to learn, but not yet. He couldn't bear for her to live with that knowledge just yet.

He knelt behind her, turning her round to face him, and placed a hand on either shoulder.

"April. I know we lost Mom, and I don't know how long Raphael will be with us, but I'm not going to leave you. I'll always be here, I promise."

She looked at him in surprise, taken aback by the solemnity in his tone, and a small part of himself was troubled by the inaccuracy of his promise. He never lied to her, he didn't believe in contorting or glossing over the truth because of her age; he had always rejected with contempt the fantasies other parents fed their children just to save themselves the trouble of explain the complex. And yet how could he tell her that he could be taken from her at any time, by an illness, an accident, any haphazard stroke of bad luck? Surely no parent could be that honest? He might love the truth, but he loved his daughter too. And at this precise moment when he felt that, more than accuracy, she needed a sense of permanence.

He wrapped his arms around her and felt her small hands come to rest on his back, squeezing him in return.

"I love you, April."

"Love you too, Daddy."

After a moment he pulled away and smiled at her, a tad blurrily. "Time for bed."

He tucked her in and switched off the light.

"Goodnight, sweetie."

"Goodnight."

After checking the doors and windows again, hovering for a moment in the kitchen doorway to watch the still sleeping form, he made his way to his own bed and lay in the dark, turning over his many questions in the dark. How was he going to find out the truth about Raphael? How could he locate his brothers, and his… was it chichi? What _was_ a chichi?

How was he going to keep April's heart from being broken?

As his thoughts grew drowsy, his thinking less clear, the answers he provided for himself became less and less grounded in reality. Perhaps they could keep him, he mused sleepily. April seemed to like the company. He could study him at his leisure. The house was big enough…

He yawned, now closer to sleep than waking.

What was the worst that could happen?


End file.
